Read a Good Word Processing Book Lately?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm a computer lab assistant at a small state college, and as such I help students with their MS Office coursework. This coursework is designed to make them operable in the open market, and help familiarize them with the word processing / spreadsheet environment. Unfortunately, it gives them a one sided perspective from a Microsoft standpoint, and the text is very unclear on the assignments. Are there any suite-independent, clear textbooks on word processing available out there?"

Comments

LaTeX

[andfarm]

I know this isn't quite an answer.

But teaching LaTeX to students would probably give them a considerable edge in some fields --- most notably in some math and science fields --- and would also keep them from getting tied to any specific program.

Word may be pretty, but LaTeX can do all the same stuff. Really.

Re:LaTeX

[whee]

Teaching ConTeXt would give them a nice head start as well. I switched to ConTeXt from LaTeX and find it to be easier to use and more powerful out of the box.

Of course there isn't a huge following, but the documentation is decent.

Re:LaTeX

[Planesdragon]

Word may be pretty, but LaTeX can do all the same stuff. Really.

LaTeX can let me open up (or convert) my extant word document and start typing, using keyboard shortcuts or toolbars to denote what exceptions I want, and spit out word counts on demand?

LaTeX can track changes, spell check, and autocorrect common typoes that I make?

LaTeX can handle god damn'd em dashes!?

If so, please e-mail me a good link. If not, please don't say that it can.

If you want pretty, use Quark or Publisher or Acrobat's product (name?). If you want to write, use Word.

Absolutely Not

[fm6]

Word processing as such is not that hard. There are few general concepts that are application independent (what's a document? what's formatting? what's a style?), but you can learn those in maybe 30 minutes. Most of the training people need for a particular word processor is coaching in how to cope with its idiosyncracies and design flaws.

In any case, you don't learn to use a word processor by reading a book. You learn by writing documents. A good text supports this activity, and thus has to refer to a specific WP.

If you really want your students to be vendor-agnostic you should train them to do similar tasks on a variety of word processors. But I suspect that your students will rebel at this approach. They'll want skills that look good on a resume. And what looks good on a resume is experience with specific apps, not generalized skills.

That's not a good thing, of course. It means that well-entrenched but badly-designed apps like Word and FrameMaker will continue to dominate. And it also means that employers will tend to prefer rote learners for jobs that probably require a degree of adapability and creativity. But you're not going to change these things just by insisting that your students learn WPs they'll never get a chance to use.

TROFF and TEX

[norwoodites]

Teach them these two and they would be set for life: learning on how to write man pages and learning on how to write manuscripts for publication.

A Few Items to Practice

[e8johan]

I have to say that you can not learn to use a Word processor without using it. No exercises in the world can replace creating real documents. Make your students use the word processor to write reports for other subjects or something.

When we are discussing word processors in general, there are some points that are extremely important to learn. These are the points that (IMHO) differs an average user and a user who knows how to use a word processor properly:

* Use paragraph (and in text) formatting. Learn to define styles, how to change the apperance of a document after having written it. Proper use of the formatting tools also gives free indexes and TOCs.

* Use the different modes of the application to see the document: outline, preview, layout, etc.

* Learn to fully use tabs, align around them, define hanging sections, etc.

* Learn proper layout. Narrower columns, only one, perhaps two fonts. Less is more, etc.

There are several more points to add to this list, but these are the ones that I can take from the top of my head...

Don't bother

[ctr2sprt]

Honestly, don't bother trying to teach these people how to use OpenOffice or AbiWord or whatever. Just teach them MS Office. I suspect they will have a hard enough time with that (if they were computeter-literate, they wouldn't need the classes). Don't confuse them by teaching them how to use things they'll never use. And besides, since everyone tries to look and act like MS Office, even a computeter-illiterate person should at least be able to be functional with any other office suite.

I understand why you don't want to tie them to MS, but there's a time and a place. Maybe if you finish the course early, or if you seem to have a quick class, you can show them around the competing open source products near the end.

Teach them design

[90XDoubleSide]

Any book that is technical in nature and is simply teching you how to use a suite is obviously going to be applicable to only one program, but if you give them a book about what to do with it, they will gain knowledge that can be used in any environment, and which will probably help them out more in the long term than learning what every menu command in suite x does. I highly recommend Robin Williams's classic The Mac Is Not a Typewriter: A Style Manual for Creating Professional-Level Type on Your Personal Computer . The revised editon will be available this spring, and The PC Is Not a Typewriter is available now.

Give them practice learning how to learn.

[lsommerer]

I teach a high school "computer applications" course. In addition to larger projects where we go over how to do specific things in specific applications, we also do some "pop-quiz" type work.

Students are given a program that they probably have not used before and an example of a document (letter, movie, presentation...) that was made with that program. They have from one to three days to figure out how to use the program and produce whatever the assignment for that program is.

Three days isn't a lot of time at 50 minutes a day, and they started out REALLY hating this. But they have discovered that they can figure out new programs on their own, and have started to enjoy it.

They are not totally out in the cold. They have the help files and they can ask their classmates for help. Those are the things they are likely to have in real life when the boss comes in and tells them that they have to give a presentation at the meeting tomorrow

Realistically, there's no program that we can teach in high school that is going to be the same as the programs they are going to be using in the workforce in 5 years, so working on figuring out new programs seems like a good choice.

Do them a favor...

[Big Sean O]

Teach them to separate content from presentation.

Learning bad habits like inserting tabs to indent paragraphs and signature blocks is not good. Sure it was fine when you used MultiMate in 1990, but it's a whole new century baby...

Teaching them about styles will pay off. Of course, Microsoft Word has a pretty spoogy way of creating and formatting styles which makes many people give up.

Once they learn how to make and apply styles, teach them how to template.

These are the two most useful (and time saving) skills you can learn with MS Word, plus they have implications in programming.

Oh, and if they're using Microsoft Excel, make sure to teach them how to use functions EARLY. Don't ask me how many times I've caught people tallying a column of numbers with a calculator in order to type the answer at the bottom of a spreadsheet...

One other skill they should learn is how to use version control software. There's a version of RCS that works quite nicely with Microsoft Word. Speaking from experience, version control is a technology whose time has come in the office. Every serious Word Processor I've worked with keeps backups of documents at critical stages (mostly out of self-defense). I've seen people reduced to tears because they've made edits to a document and then told to 'go back to the way it was'.

Learning to learn is good, but...

[fm6]

Three days isn't a lot of time at 50 minutes a day, and they started out REALLY hating this. But they have discovered that they can figure out new programs on their own, and have started to enjoy it.

I applaud your teaching style. And it's absolutely the right way to teach any technical subject -- in a high school.

In an ideal world, this would always be the right way. Thinking skills and adaptability is more important than having a nice set of technical buzzwords on your resume. At least that's what I look for when my boss asks me to interview a job candidate.

Unfortunately, we're not talking about a high school, where the teachers have a captive audience and a mandate to develop their students' intellectual skills. We're talking about a computer lab where unemployable people come to grab the skills that will make them employable. Which means the buzzword-resume factor is important, even vital. Because most interviewers are a lot more buzzword-oriented than I am. And because the students are people who have to carefully allocate their learning time.

So thinking skills have to take a back-seat to buzzword compliance. If you can sneak them in, fine. But you can't make them the thrust of your teaching, or you'll lose your students.

It's a Word and Excel Job Market

[reallocate]

People looking for word processor and spreadsheet work must know Word and Excel.

Unless you are their instructor, I'd lay back. Answer any questions that come our way, but don't roll out an alernate list of readings. Let them spend the time trying to get an edge with the two programs the business world thinks are synonymous with word processing and spreadsheets.

Re:It's a Word and Excel Job Market

[xtremex]

This may seem weird, but I went to college to learn, not to use a product! I'm didn't pay $120,000 to learn a corporate product. I lpaid that money to learn how to think and apply the skills you were taught anywhere....this is why our education system is down the toilet.My wife is learning how to sew w/ a sewing machine...is she learning Singer? No, she's learning sewing, that can be applied to Singer sewing mahines. (All sewing machines are different).She was taught the right way...learn the concepts of threading a bobbin, and you can use any sewing machine. When will the "advanced" field of computers catch up?

Content and Presentation in the real world

[fm6]

Teach them to separate content from presentation.

This is the wrong pace for Content Mangement slogans. Beginning word processers just aren't going to get any benefit from having abstract CM ideas thrown at them.

I'm not saying the idea C/P separation is bogus (though many Slashdotters would). In point of fact, I work in technical communication, where the C/P separation is essential. (I'm also getting an object lesson in the consquences of ignoring the issue: I'm helping XMLify a huge RTF document base that should have been converted to markup a decade ago.) But not every letter, term paper, or personal web page needs such an elaborate approach. Especially when the student is working with Microsoft Word, which does a particularly lousy job of helping separate presentation from content.

Re:Content and Presentation in the real world

[Big Sean O]

Especially when the student is working with Microsoft Word, which does a particularly lousy job of helping separate presentation from content.

That's exactly the reason you should teach them the concept. Because they will never pick it up from casual use of Microsoft Word. They'll end up learning the hard way.

If you are doing a structured document with headings (a term paper or report), the benefits of learning Microsoft's style sheets will pay off.

But I also think it's important to do it for a one-off memo or letter. Why teach them "tab tab tab tab tab tab Sincerely," when the default letter stylesheet has styles for signature blocks.

I don't expect them to use XML and CSS and XSLT (heaven forbid!), but they should be aware of the concept and understand how to apply it (when warrented) in Word.

Re:Word is Dead.

[joto]

It would make more sense, if it wasn't for the fact that all XML editors suck. Users want WYSIWYG, and I have yet to see a usable WYSIWYG XML editor.

C/P in Word

[fm6]

You do have a point, but I'd be reluctant to emphasize these concepts to people using Word as the first word processor. The problem is that Word actively works against C/P separation. Yes, it has styles, but the mechanisms for applying them are weird, complicated and inconsistent. And if you want to do serious style usage, you have to do some serious customization. Because the default paragraph style is "Normal" a style totally inadequate for serious document preparation, and there's built-in way to change this. Because when you click on a bullet paragaph button, you don't get one of the pre-defined bullet styles, you get your current style modified to include a bullet. (Well not quite true, there's some weird "I know what you really mean" mechanism that makes this change under circumstance I've never figured out.) I could go on.

I have a co-worker is quite aware of the C/P concept. In fact, we hired him for his XML expertise! But when he uses Word, he still makes all the mistakes you describe, because he has better things to do with his time than fight with Word's obscure and poorly documented feature set.

Remember, Content-Presentation separation isn't an end in itself. It has various purposes, but the one that matters to Word users is making large documents maintainable. And the way to teach newbie Word users about maintainability is to introduce them to formatting, then show them how encapsulating formatting in styles makes a document more maintainable. That's something they can see and understand. If you lecture them about content management abstractions like Content-Presentation separation, they'll have no context in which to place these concepts, and they simply won't retain them.

Of course, Content-Presentation separation serves other purposes, like making large technical document bases maintainable and delivering content in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, etc.). But if these purposes are important to your project, you shouldn't be using a word processor at all.

Re:Word is Dead.

[90XDoubleSide]

Basically all you're saying is that the employees should just write copy, and some program should automatically set the type using some preset template (it isn't really relevant what format the copy is in; copy/type is a different distinction than structure/presentation as one deals with the English language and the other deals with programming language). This is exactly the way things have been done for a long time, it's just that many people have lost the distinction between copywriting and typesetting now that you can do it all at once in word processing apps.

Sometimes this is a good thing (when you want to get out a unique document very quickly) and sometimes it isn't (when people with no training in typesetting are sending out memos with four different fonts and underlined text). This semester I've forced myself to write all my papers in BBEdit and then set them in InDesign, and I must say that while it adds a few minutes to the process, by preventing yourself from getting lazy you get much better looking and consistent documents.

Re:Word is Dead.

[joto]

This misses the point. We do not need a new WYSIWYG word processor that saves stuff in .xml instead of .doc

True, that would wouldn't be of much help (it would help some, but not much).

But there are so many other neat possibilites. For end users, writing a document should be like filling out a form. it should not require having understood LaTeX, HTML, XML, or any other insane markup system.

And that's why all XML editors suck. Because an XML editor intended for end-user should be WYSIWYG. It should not require knowledge of tags. And it should be easy to configure for the local IT people.

The way it should work was this. Local IT people write DTD/Schema and stylesheets for common document-types. Then they feed DTD/Schema and stylesheet (possibly with some more info) to a nifty XML editor, and the end result looks like expensive custom-written application.

If XML can't do that, I really don't know what the purpose of using it is. Because you will never, ever, ever, get everyone in your company to convert from Word to something less userfriendly just because you prefer to work that way.

But then again, we will get this. Whether it will be called Mozilla or IE or something else, is still an open question, though...

Re:Word is Dead.

[90XDoubleSide]

I don't think BBEdit really needs to be anything more than a text editor; I can't imagine trying to do all the stuff I do in InDesign with hand coding.

How on earth do you kern your display type with code? Type in a new value (i.e. Title, and so on), hit preview output, enter a whole new set of values, and then repeat this process 12 times until it's right because you can't just use a slider and see the results immediately?

I agree that a plaintext version of the document with some kind minimal style markup is what you want for copy, and keeping a copy of it around gives you an easily searchable and updatable document, but it would take at least 10 times as long to set type with code as it would in a GUI; It's no coincidence at all that the desktop publishing revolutio coincided with the GUI revolution.

Re:Word is Dead.

[90XDoubleSide]

I absolutely agree with this; in a large business all internal documents being done to a consistant style sheet not only saves massive amounts of work, but also creates a more consistant and professional appearance to the comany's works. Anything to be published outside of the company, however, does need to have the little touches like kerning applied to it (but in a huge corporation, over 95% of what is written is internal, and external documents should all be going throught eh design team anyway).

What the employees need to accomplish this is not a programming class in XML and a text editor, but a WYSIWYG document editor that doesn't allow them to deviate from the set style, and emphsasizes speed. For example, you create a new document, there is a box at the top where you type the title, which would be set in the appropriate font and size (the app wouldn't have font or size menus). They then click in the body section and type whatever they want to. The program has commands to make the body text italic, bold or indented, a command to make numbered or bulleted lists, a command to make subheads (which would again be set in the appropriate font and size) and little else. The program could store these documents in a simple XML format, and have the ability to print them or export them as PDF (so that people outside the corporation could read them, or so that they could be sent to a print shop).

Here's my outline

[foo fighter]

This is late to the party. Hope you see this. I wish you had provided an email where I could reach you.

No, there aren't any office suite agnostic books out there that are worth your time. I've looked.

_Running Microsoft Office_ is my recommended reference for that suite, but it's not a great teaching book.

I've developed my own materials that I present in the Intro to Computers class I teach. Here's the outline in a nutshell. It's everything you need to use any word processor. You can flesh it out to actually present yourself.

Essential Word Processor Skills
I. Enter & Edit Text
A. Delete & Backspace Keys
B. Arrow Keys
C. Word Wrap & Enter Key
D. Selecting Text
E. Cut, Copy, & Paste
F. Undo & Redo
II. Layout
A. Justification
B. Margins
C. Tabs
D. Tables
E. Headers & Footers
III. Format
A. Text Properties
i. Typeface (Maximum of two per document: 1 heading and 1 body text)
ii. Size
iii. Bold, Italic, & Underline
iv. Text, Highlight, & Background Color
B. Indenting, Number, & Bullets
C. WordArt (Stress this should rarely be used)
IV. Tools
A. Save, Save As, & Open
B. Print Preview, Page Setup, & Layout Views
C. Spell Check
D. Options (tell them they're there, point to Help for more info; very app specific)
V. Workflow
A. Save Regularly
B. Enter Text
C. Layout Text
D. Format Text
E. Spellcheck & Edit Text

This all seems very basic, I'm sure. In fact, most people who have been using computers for years still don't know this stuff. My experience has shown the outline above cover the essentials people have to know. Don't leave anything out, but don't add anything either.

You can cover it all in an hour if you rush. Ideally, you create some exercises for each topic and cover a couple topics per class (Enter & Edit Text, Layout, etc.). Stress the Workflow from the beginning and at each topic, this is where most people do the most damage. They type some, format it, type some, format it... until the document looks and reads like a ransom note and weird formatting errors abound. Then they lose it all when the program crashes because they haven't saved since they started typing.

The essential topics any Intro to Computers class should cover, IMHO, are Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Windows/Operating System, Hardware & Software Components, Computer History & Current Business Usage, Internet & LAN (including Netiquette), and Security.

I could go on for a long time about this stuff. I've developed all my own materials because what is generally available is crap. Someday I'll post it to the web under the OCL, but it's mostly up in my head right now. Hopefully I've given you enough to start from.

Good Luck!